It depends which trains and what times you are looking at - Eurostar is very expensive in times of high demand because the cheap tickets get snapped up but can be relatively affordable if you choose less popular times.
It is nationalised - by the French! SNCF are majority owners of the parent company, not sure what SNCB/NMBS hold in the Eurostar specific subsidiary or the overall Eurostar group.
Been promoted a number of times. DB want to run Cologne/Frankfurt-London Services but every time they get close either the Channel Tunnel safety rules or the economics of the business case trip them up, security often costing just too much to provide at German stations. I believe the Spanish have expressed interest in running an OAO operation from London-Paris as a direct competitor but nothing particularly serious appears to have come of it. DB at least got as far as getting an ICE3 into St Pancras (believe it was Diesel-Hauled from Calais though) as a publicity/demonstrator event.
According to the 2020 Network Statement: https://www.getlinkgroup.com/content/uploads/2019/09/Eurotunnel-network-statement-2020.pdf The price per passenger works out to EUR17.68 per passenger in 2015 prices (page 42). Doubling in 8 years is not impossible but I suspect the £40 advances wouldn't be viable if there's only a £10 revenue coming back to E* on it.
Ah fair enough! I suspect I may have had £30 in my head as at those prices it would work out at roughly £30 for a return journey but not a single like I said originally.
Tunnel transit costs (on a per passenger basis), security (both criminal and immigration) costs, border control costs, High speed line access fees. If it is costing £600 return to Geneva next month, perhaps look for a cheaper day/time/route. [or is it Easter and demand is likely to be high even at those sort of prices?]
What would be reasonable, would be a green aviation passenger tax for air passengers within a certain distance of London, which could be used to subsidise Eurostar fares as a greener former travel. But, probably only on flights to those countries easily accesed by Eurostar- France, Benelux, Germany. It would also incentivise those passengers to get the train rather than fly.
Although I fully support a green aviation tax for short-haul flights, I think there are more effective ways to use the revenue than subsidising Eurostar. I'd first target first/last mile decarbonisation, because that will naturally involve rail as part of the answer. Electric buses, e-bike hire schemes, effective cycle facilities, effective cycle paths, better bus route planners, better integrated rail/bus fares, etc.
Seems a reasonable idea, but probably a bit complicated in practice.
Why would 'they' do that? The current owners would have to be bought out, and the cost of that passed onto E* ticket holders. If it wasn't, it would be a subsidy to them, and what purpose would that subsidy serve?
For all sorts of reasons, well discussed in this forum, you are probably right.
As I've mentioned, it was nationalised until 2014, when a 30-year subsidiary was sold to the Ontario pension fund
There's a practical limit to the capacity you can offer on a market like Eurostar. At the moment London-Brussels is served approximately 2-hourly with c.900 seats, for 450 seats/hr. This is the equivalent of a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320 departing every 20-25 minutes from London to Brussels. There's only so much a market based around the train can offer.
Given it was viable to run London-Marseilles, with the extension of the LGV from Montpellier to Perpignan and if LGV Picardie ever happens, it's not completely off the table. But I don't see it being more than 1 or 2 times per week on a seasonal basis.
Yes. I believe they essentially have a set amount of tickets available at each price band, and as more tickets are sold the tickets step up into the next price bands. You will often find looking only a few weeks ahead that midweek early and late trains are into the c.£200 range while trains during the day are much closer to £100 looking at the same date.
Quite, and 10% off ATM.
Which makes even more of a mockery of charging Interrail passholders €30+ for their "reservation". That's on top of Eurostar's allocation of the pass revenue, which ought really to cover these fees anyway; revenue allocation is likely now a lot more accurate with the advent of mobile passes.
Eurostar is (deemed to be/operated as) a premium service, for which potential demand far outstrips the supply. A lot of money is to be made simply from people travelling between London and the key destinations served directly from Eurostar. The company is more than happy for you to fly to Geneva instead of taking the train because they can easily fill their trains with people doing shorter distance journeys, for which the train is the better option.
I think there's two or three threads already running on that question!Whether it should be this way is another question; if anyone has any alternative ideas on how the service should be run that could be an interesting speculative thread. But this is the (unfortunate) reality
Quite so. Eurostar is just one of the international TGV routes SNCF operate or have a big say in, and SNCF regard pass holders as cash cows, particularly on international TGVs.
Except I have no doubt that they feel the allocation of pass revenue per passenger journey is nowhere near as much as single journey ticket holders, hence the hefty supplement.
That's undoubtedly the case, but the same could be said for many other operators and yet they choose not to charge such hefty supplements. It's pure profiteering in my mind.
